Some embodiments described herein relate generally to Fibre Channel fabrics, and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for providing a distributed Fibre Channel control and forwarding plane for a Fibre Channel fabric.
Some known Fibre Channel fabrics implement a centralized control-plane design across multiple independent Fibre Channel switches without full distribution of software and services. Such a Fibre Channel fabric typically does not scale well because of the limits encountered with building large scale Fibre Channel fabrics from a large collection of independent Fibre Channel switches. Some other known Fibre Channel fabrics are built based on single large Fibre Channel switches. Such a Fibre Channel fabric, however, typically does not scale on switches, especially on large switches that host thousands of Fibre Channel ports. The limitations in scalability of those Fibre Channel fabrics can be caused by the limited size of conventional Fibre Channel switches. Furthermore, the limitations in scalability for the known Fibre Channel fabrics described above typically do not change with the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) mechanism being applied, because those limitations are not transport dependent.
Accordingly, a need exists for a solution that can enable a Fibre Channel control plane to scale on a large distributed Fibre Channel switch and can be used for FCoE as well.